The Mountain Meadows Massacre was the deadliest act of American domestic terrorism before the Oklahoma City bombing. Mormon militia, disguised as Native Americans, massacred 120 members of the Baker-Fancher emigrant train after a 5-day siege. The victims were persuaded to surrender their weapons under a flag of truce and then executed. John D. Lee was the only person ever punished; he was executed at the massacre site in 1877. The event remains deeply controversial in Utah history.
The early republic period saw the United States move from the weak Articles of Confederation to the federal Constitution ratified in 1788, with the Bill of Rights added in 1791. George Washington served two terms as president (1789–1797), establishing precedents for executive authority, and the federal capital moved permanently to Washington D.C. in 1800. The Louisiana Purchase (1803) doubled the nation's territory for roughly $15 million, opening vast trans-Mississippi lands to American expansion. The War of 1812 against Britain ended inconclusively but produced a surge of American national identity and eliminated most British support for Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi. The Northwest Indian Wars (1785–1795) and the Creek War (1813–1814) broke Indigenous confederacies that had resisted US expansion. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 temporarily balanced slave and free states as the nation expanded westward, but embedded the contradiction of slavery in every subsequent territorial debate.
120 adults and older children killed; 17 children under 8 spared and later returned to families
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